Watch this entrepreneur explain how he was targeted and raided by the federal government for breaking a law, despite language in the law that explicitly said he was acting legally. Bradford Councilman had a business, Interloc, Inc., that utilized an internet database for customers to upload their inventory of rare and out-of-print books while other customers could search the database for books they could not find elsewhere. One day, armed federal agents burst into Councilman’s office and forced him to wait while they searched the premises. The government charged him with creating a separate copy of an email every time...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A federal judge has entered a final ruling barring an Indiana law that changed the classification of abortion clinics in a way that opponents say targeted a Planned Parenthood center in Lafayette that provided only drug-induced abortions. U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson entered a permanent injunction and final judgment Wednesday siding with Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky and barring the 2013 law because it violated the constitutional Equal Protection Clause. She ruled preliminarily last month.

The recent surge in abortion laws -- more were enacted between 2011 and 2013 than in the previous decade -- met both success and defeat in court challenges in 2014. That fight over women's access to abortion likely will continue in the months to come, as both houses of U.S. Congress will be Republican-led, as will even more state houses. What issues will be at the battle lines? Ten states have laws in place banning abortion after 20 weeks; Nebraska was the first to pass theirs, in 2010. Proponents argue that 20 weeks is when a fetus can begin to...

LITTLE ROCK — In its first regular session after passing one of the strictest abortion laws in the country, the Arkansas Legislature is expected to consider several more proposed restrictions on the procedure. In 2013, the Legislature enacted a bill to ban most abortions at 12 weeks or later into a pregnancy, overriding a veto by Gov. Mike Beebe. The law’s fate is now in the hands of the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, which is considering the state’s appeal of a federal judge’s ruling that partially struck it down. In the meantime, several state legislators...

The U.S. Navy announced Wednesday that a new laser weapon deployed into Persian Gulf earlier this year performed seamlessly during testing that wrapped up in November, and declared the weapon a success. Deployed for the first time aboard the U.S.S. Ponce in September, the Office of Naval Research released a video Wednesday of the LaWS (laser weapon system) taking out two test targets

NASHVILLE — The approval of a constitutional amendment to give the state Legislature more power to regulate abortions in Tennessee may have opened the floodgates to proposals from Republican lawmakers in the upcoming session, but Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey said Thursday that he doesn't expect most of them to be enacted.

December 03, 2014 So Like Everyone On the Right is Now Outraged by the Garner Death Just Like They Were Outrage by the "Militarization of Police" in Ferguson I'm a dissenter. Frankly, I think everyone on the right is looking to prove "We're not one of those sorts of people who automatically defends anyone who kills a black person." And we did that in three Racial Incidents running. I know my first reaction in both Trayvon Martin's case, and in Michael Brown's case, was to side with the black victim. And maybe this is the wrong time to put my...

The big Republican gains in the November elections strengthened and enlarged the anti-abortion forces in the House and the Senate. But it’s the GOP victories in the statehouses and governor’s mansions that are priming the ground for another round of legal restrictions on abortion. Arkansas, for instance, already has strict anti-abortion laws. But with a Republican governor succeeding a Democrat who had vetoed two measures that would have banned most abortions beyond a certain stage of pregnancy, lawmakers plan to seek more restrictions — such as barring doctors from administering abortion drugs through telemedicine. Republican gains in the West Virginia...

Even as abortion advocates in Tennessee try to find a loophole to invalidate the legitimately passed Amendment 1, lawmakers are wasting no time responding to the bill’s passage. First up is a an ultrasound bill, prefiled by Rep. Rick Womick, R-Rockvale. The Tennessean reports that the “main requirement of the bill calls for a woman to receive an ultrasound within 24 to 72 hours of when she plans to have the abortion.” Womick noted that currently abortion facilities do ultrasounds anyway and that this bill would simply say, “look, let the mother see the picture and hear the heartbeat, that’s...

Alabama has become the seventh state to ban Sharia law via a ballot measure that prohibits its courts from considering foreign, international or religious law. Tuesday night, the ballot measure, called the “American and Alabama Laws and Alabama Courts Amendment,” passed overwhelmingly with 72 percent of voters in support. The ban clarifies the state constitution to say that other state laws or foreign law cannot be used in ways that violate state law or rights under the Alabama Constitution or the U.S. Constitution. In 2012, an unsuccessful ballot measure, also proposed by Republican state Sen. Gerald Allen, would have explicitly banned...

Hear the story of George Norris, a 67-year old hobbyist, was convicted and sent to prison for failure to comply with obscure laws involving his small business – selling orchids from his backyard. George Norris, a 67-year old hobbyist, developed a small business selling imported orchids out of his backyard greenhouse. Norris did his best to make sure he was in compliance with laws and regulations regarding his hobby. That’s why he was surprised to come home one day to find his house being raided by armed federal agents. After spending his life savings and borrowing what he could to...

I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot,” Abigail Borah, a youth delegate to the 2011 Durban climate negotiations, yelled from the conference floor. “I am scared for my future,” she cried, silencing Todd Stern, the Obama administration’s chief climate negotiator. “We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty.” Now the Obama administration is signaling that there will be not be a new climate treaty. According to a report in Wednesday’s New York Times, the path to a treaty has come to an end, 14 months before the...

Linette LopezAugust 20, 2014Muted headlines about bond swaps aren't doing justice to the announcement Argentina's president made last night. With her attempt to pass a law nullifying a U.S. Court's ruling that the country pay all its creditors, Argentina is effectively turning its back on the rules governing international finance. If Argentina's congress passes this law, the country could enter a place where rules no longer matter and negotiation with the hedge funds to which it owes over $1.3 billion in sovereign debt are all but impossible. What this law does is put debt that was once legally governed by...

Meet the Press featured a segment this Sunday that illustrates the planted liberal axioms that dominate our political culture. The topic was Congress’s failure to “get anything done” this term. NBC News’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd, set the stage: New polling from NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, and Marist . . . shows that three out of four voters agree that Congress hasn’t done much this year . . . And guess what? The public’s right. Congress hasn’t been productive. In fact, this Congress . . . is on track to be the least productive in...

"Oversight Dems to America: “You Don’t Have the Right to Know” about White House Spending Taxpayer Dollars on Political Activity" Committee votes to reject White House claim that head of political office has absolute immunity from Congress Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved a resolution to reject White House assertions of “absolute immunity” for political affairs office head, David Simas, who has failed to appear before the Committee twice. This morning, the White House declined Chairman’s further accommodation to allow Mr. Simas to comply with his obligations under the subpoena. Yesterday, Chairman Issa offered White House Counsel Neil...

Ahh, government: In this weekÂ’s Â“Damned if You Do, Damned if You DonÂ’tÂ” file: A Southern California couple received a letter from Glendora city officials threatening to fine them $500 if they donÂ’t get their sun-scorched brown lawn green again, reports AP. Which Laura Whitney and Michael Korte would gladly do, except for one thing: They could also be fined $500 if they water their lawn too much; theyâ€™re currently only watering twice a week. With more than 80% of California in an extreme drought, according to the Los Angeles Times, the state water board voted this week to...

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama laughed off an offer of a joint. A legal one, mind you, since this was Colorado. We’ve come a long way, baby, since five years ago when the exact same president was making cheap stoner jokes in response to serious questions about changing drug policy. These last few years have seen — and continue to see — an amazing pushback against the excesses of the drug war. Like the Berlin Wall, the war on drugs seemed like it would stand forever. The arguable “tear down this wall” moment for drug policy came in November, 2012,...

Why is it that democracies so often generate public policies that are wasteful and unjust? Why do such policies persist over long periods of time, even when they are known to be harmful? Assuming that you’ve pondered those questions, you’d probably also like to understand why, on rare occasions, bad policies do get repealed. If you have entertained those questions, or now see that they are worth entertaining, here is a book you’ll want to read. In Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers, economics professors Wayne Leighton (of Universidad Francisco Marroquin) and Edward Lopez (of Western Carolina University) take readers on...

Wikipedia has an article describing the six times Republican politicians suggested impeaching Barack Obama, the most serious of which was a hearing by the House Judiciary Committee “formally titled ‘The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws,’ that has been viewed as an attempt to begin justifying impeachment proceedings”. None of these have gone anywhere and there is clearly no present momentum behind the project, as suggested by the absence of a groundswell for a petition to impeach the president and a dearth of newspaper articles suggesting the same. The process itself, as described by Wikipedia, is surprisingly simple....

We might not have the ObamaCare mess if more people judged legislation by what it actually does instead of what its proponents hope it will accomplish. Think of verbs to truly understand what a bill does. There are specific verbs that describe the precise action of any bill. The Mackinac Center's short, plain-English bill descriptions (found on the VoteSpotter app and MichiganVotes.org) are built around those verbs. A great many descriptions include words like "prohibit," "mandate," "impose," "tax," "require," "restrict," "penalize" and "subsidize." If those verbs sound negative, it's not because we have a bias against the bills. It's because...

In January, I wrote a column called "The United Whims of America," which argued that the trend of politicians ignoring laws with which they disagree was a dangerous development. The central point, more true every day, is we are no longer a nation of laws, but a nation of whims – a people whose laws are in a constant state of flux depending upon who holds various offices. The consequences of this shift from laws to whims, if not reined in, will fundamentally transform the country in ways we cannot predict or allow. The problem of Congress passing and presidents...

Earlier this week, Sen. Jeff Sessions said that the president was deliberately dismantling our law enforcement system. Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked Rep. Gowdy about that. Rep. Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, agrees with Sen. Sessions that the president is systematically dismantling the nation’s laws, but he believes it is to win elections not to pursue an agenda. They [the administration] do however fundamentally view their role differently, he added. Attorney General Eric Holder recently claimed that illegal immigration is a civil right, if that is so, Gowdy says, that is like saying you and I have the right...

A government money grab that's been operating under the guise of public safety might soon be ended. Legislation to scrap Michigan's "driver responsibility fees" has overwhelming support in the Legislature. In 2003, state lawmakers passed a bill that assessed "driver responsibility fees" in an effort to bring in additional revenue. The move was thinly veiled as a measure to ensure drivers were operating vehicles safely. However, the fees often go beyond simply assigning stiffer penalties for unsafe driving practices. In many instances they pile on costs that individuals don't have the ability to pay. What's more, under certain circumstances they...

"....Hounding out people with different views is seen by the Left as a necessary means to achieve its supposedly noble goals — just like the Spanish Inquisitioners who claimed God was on their side as they went after religiously “incorrect” Jews, Muslims, and heretics. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been part of the problem, not part of the solution. Its appointees used the once-impartial IRS against conservatives. They monitored Associated Press reporters. They denied that the NSA was eavesdropping on average citizens. They arbitrarily chose not to enforce laws they didn’t like. The president bragged of using “a pen and...

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Eric Holder offered an alarming new doctrine for the Republic: laws are only suggestions, and the real authority to enforce or not enforce them lies in the hands of the president and his cabinet officers. (snip) There is a vast amount of discretion that a president has — and more specifically that an attorney general has,” Holder responded. “But that discretion has to be used in an appropriate way so that your acting consistent with the aims of the statute but at the same time making sure that you are acting in

There’s been a lot of discussion among members of the Armed Intelligentsia lately about how Connecticut’s finest might proceed if they decide to confiscate unregistered guns from the state’s 100,000 or more newly-minted felons. The level of concern is evidenced by daily long comment threads, speculative posts by people who are not members of law enforcement, and even a couple of contributed opinions from the LEO community. The rational consensus seems to be that if the gun-grab order were given, cops would pinch a registration scofflaw at the grocery store, at work, on the road…anyplace other than his or her...

Last Sunday, The New York Times published a front-page article about the heartfelt need of California farmers for more illegal aliens. The first tip-off that heinous public policy ideas were coming was that the Times introduced farmer Chuck Herrin, owner of a farm-labor contracting company, as a "lifelong Republican." That's Times-speak for "liberal." Herrin admitted that he employs a lot of illegal aliens and bitterly complained that they lived in fear of "Border Patrol and deportations." (But, apparently, he doesn't live in fear of admitting he's violating our immigration laws.) Sorry that running a country inconveniences you, Chuck. He said...

Parent and child rights, abortion, and baby-selling are among issues coloring the debate among Maryland legislators over a gestational surrogacy bill passed by the Senate March 20 and awaiting action by the House Rules Committee. The Maryland Catholic Conference supports the Maryland Collaborative Reproduction Act (S.B. 208) as amended, in order to protect the parties involved – intended parents, surrogate mothers and the children surrogacy arrangements produce. As the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic bishops, the MCC does not support surrogacy, and in past years has simply opposed similar legislation. “We would prefer a ban,” said Andrea Garvey,...

In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA's most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the public debate. This behavior constitutes the government's assaults on the American legal system. Those assaults have been conducted thus far on two fronts, one of which is aimed at lawyers who represent foreign entities here in America, and the other is aimed at lawyers who represent criminal defendants against whom evidence has been obtained unlawfully and presented in court...

Mayor de Blasio’s SUV was caught on camera speeding through Queens and blowing through two stop signs Thursday — just two days after he announced a sweeping street-safety plan. The mayor — who was riding shotgun on the way back to City Hall from a pothole-filling photo op — was twice clocked going 15 mph over the speed limit by a WCBS/Channel 2 news crew. The two-car caravan also ran past two stop signs without even tapping the brakes and changed highway lanes without signaling, the CBS video shows. De Blasio’s wild ride came after his pledge to personally abide...

by Gina Cassini | Top Right News Today, an Arizona state senate committee approved a bill that would virtually nullify all federal gun acts, laws, orders, rules or regulations. The vote was 6-3.Along with twelve sponsors and co-sponsors, Arizona State Sen. Kelli Ward introduced the Second Amendment Preservation Act in the Grand Canyon State. SB1294 prohibits the state from enforcing “any federal act, law, order, rule or regulation that relates to a personal firearm, firearm accessory or ammunition within the limits of this state.” “We’ve sat back and allowed the federal government to trample the Constitution long enough,” Ward said. “We’re going...

In the wake of media reports that 40,000 new federal, state, and local laws will go into effect this year, there’s no better time for Americans to revisit the old maxim that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” An unknown number of these new provisions are criminal laws that can deprive us of our liberty and brand us for life. No ordinary American can be expected to know every law, new and old, on the books, not even every criminal law. Anyone concerned about Americans’ being locked up for innocent behavior should resolve to help end overcriminalization. Overcriminalization strikes...

Legend has it that the long arm of Texas law once extended to hotel balconies where the men with star badges would take into custody anyone who violated a state statute forbidding people to hunt buffalo from such a perch. The legend ends at the Legislative Reference Library of Texas, where a team of librarians has gone through the records and sorted out fact from fiction when it comes to the laws of the Lone Star State. "The ideas of the history of Texas capture the imagination with those stories of cattle drives and the old West. People want to...

**SNIP** When the Legislature opened on Wednesday, Senate GOP leaders said passing a gun rights bill was a top priority for the legislative session. Like last year's bill, the new version would also reduce the age requirement for concealed carry permits from 21 to 19 and prohibit municipalities from passing ordinances to limit openly carrying a firearm. Many Missouri Democrats are likely to oppose the measure again this year as an unconstitutional waste of the Legislature's time. "The state will never trump federal laws," said Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, a St. Louis Democrat. "It is again another right wing Republican attempt...

One of the great places to observe the successes of New Year’s resolutions is at the gym. January invariably sees the place packed with new people in their new workout clothes looking at the sea of machines trying to figure out what machine does what and you use them. By March the scene is much different in that a majority of those newbies have fallen off their path to fitness while those remaining have figured out which machines they like and what routines keep them going. The beauty of New Year’s resolutions is that whatever your hubris at the end...

Some 22 states enacted 70 new provisions to target abortion last year, the second most ever, prompting an outcry from Planned Parenthood, which accused “out-of-touch Tea Party politicians” with using “every underhanded trick in the book to get these laws passed.” A new report from the Guttmacher Institute said that the 70 provisions were second in number to the nearly 90 approved in 2011. The group said that 205 abortion restrictions were approved over the past three years, more than the 189 enacted during the previous decade. The report also noted that many states increased access to abortion, such as...

Car Washes AB 1387 increases the bond requirement for car wash establishments from $15,000 to $150,000, with a specific exemption for employers with a collective bargaining agreement in place that provides for wages, hours of work, working conditions and "an expeditious process to resolve disputes concerning nonpayment of wages."

LANSING — There are thousands of federal laws and many more coming from the states. So many, that at the national level the government doesn't even try to add them up anymore. And while historically the state has had to show that a person knowingly committed a crime, many criminal statutes have abandoned this approach. In recent decades, the government has criminalized an ever-increasing amount of activity, including many things not thought to be harming anyone. What can be done to turn that tide while keeping society safe was the topic of an "Issues and Ideas" event put on by...

HARRISBURG, PA, December 17, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Pennsylvania lawmaker has proposed a bill that would forbid Catholic schools from enforcing the Catholic church's teachings on homosexuality in parochial schools, a measure its critics are calling “ludicrous” and “dangerous to basic human freedoms.” The bill gained new life after Holy Ghost Preparatory School in the Philadelphia suburb of Bensalem fired Michael Griffin, who taught French and Italian. Griffin lives in New Jersey, where a county superior court judge legalized same-sex “marriage” in September, a decision that stood after Republican Governor Chris Christie dropped his appeal. After the ruling, Griffin and...

Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina, a Republican, is sponsoring a resolution in the House of Representatives that would, if adopted, direct the legislative body "to bring a civil action for declaratory or injunctive relief to challenge certain policies and actions taken by the executive branch." In other words, Rep. Rice wants to take President Obama to court for not faithfully executing the laws. "President Obama has adopted a practice of picking and choosing which laws he wants to enforce. In most cases, his laws of choice conveniently coincide with his Administration’s political agenda. Our Founding Fathers created the Executive...

It's not just the American economy that has a deficit problem but American law. Call it a deficit of common sense. Here's the latest, irritating and all too common example of this recurrent problem, even plague. According to an appellate court up in New York state, prayers offered by private citizens at the invitation of a town council in Greece, N.Y., represent an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Why, for Heaven's sake? According to that court's "reasoning," the municipal government violated the First Amendment, which both (a) guarantees freedom of religion and (b) forbids government to establish one. Which is...

In the video that you can see by clicking on the "Enza Ferreri Blog" link above, entitled "Incentives for Immoral Behavior", the American economist Professor Milton Friedman explains how there are fundamentally two types of law: those that are regarded as moral and just by the vast majority of people, and those which are not. The former group of laws are generally obeyed because they speak to the inner moral sense of the population, the latter have a high rate of violations. Obviously, the greater the number of laws and regulations, the higher the number of them that will be...

This is an outrage. Team Obama WRECKS THINGS FOR THE PURPOSE OF ALTERING THEM the way the Marxists want them to be. Since the day he took office, Obama has virtually stopped deportations and opened our borders to all foreign invaders. As the master of creating problems for the purpose of CHANGING them, Obama is now pushing for Amnesty for illegals. Although Republicans SHOULD let the Democrats stew in their own Obamacare website misery after being denied their request to delay Obamacare as part of the shutdown negotiations, Darryl Issa will bring 'Immigration reform' legislation to the House floor in...

Washington has a bad habit of naming laws by what they are not. These euphemisms usually win temporary public support. After all, who wants to be against anything "affordable"? But on examination, such idealistically named legislation usually turns out to be aimed at special interests and the opposite of what voters were promised. The "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010," otherwise known as Obamacare, frontloaded for immediate enactment some popular freebies. Who would oppose keeping children on their parents' health coverage until age 26, or prohibiting denial of insurance for those with pre-existing illnesses? Then, three years...

Bullying doesn't just happen on the playground," so begins an article in an online Health and Human Services (HHS) publication called Let's Talk. The HHS's Federal Occupational Health agency cites a recent study finding that more than a third of Americans report being bullied at work, though only 15 percent report having observed bullying in the workplace. The newsletter is illustrated with this graphic: The article defines bullying as "aggressive, inappropriate, and unreasonable behavior," and says that bullying "[h]as many of the same characteristics of domestic violence – the abuser uses intimidation and manipulation to get what he or she...

The gang of seven immigration bill in the House is dead, at least for this year. Dem Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a key player on immigration as a member of the gang told Greg Sargeant of the Washington Post, that the bill is stalled and not expected to go anywhere soon. Certainly not this fall and unlikely this winter session. That throws it into an election year, which could effectively kill the bill altogether. Two reasons the bill has failed is that the republican leadership has refused to support any immigration bill and while on August vacation, many republicans heard from...

The GOP-controlled Michigan Legislature in 2012 enacted a wide array of potentially transformational government reforms. In 2013, a new Legislature is backsliding and risks fully slipping into its business-as-usual mode. Recent examples include a measure to implement Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and to raise many fees. Coming soon may be a net-sales tax increase on internet shoppers, and authorizing new local government borrow-and-spend powers. On Tuesday legislation (House Bills 4202 and 4203) that would permit additional sales tax revenue to be collected on E-commerce was advanced by the House Tax Policy Committee. Formally, this is known as the “Main Street Fairness”...

The Obama Administration has set a precedent of picking and choosing when and how and if laws will be enforced. Today the Wall Street Journal is reporting another move to add to the ever growing list of lawlessness: President Obama asserted the unilateral power to "tweak" inconvenient laws in last Friday's news conference, underscoring his Administration's increasingly cavalier notions about law enforcement. So it's good that the judiciary—a coequal branch of government, in case the Administration forgot—is starting to check the White House. In a major rebuke on Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an unusual writ of...